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Introducing the Warpship
astroengine writes "Dr. Richard Obousy, a guy who has put modern science into the warp drive, has designed his very own warpship. Now, for the first time, he's shared it with the world. It might not be the sleek Starship Enterprise, but its structure has been optimized to harness local 'dark energy,' generating a warp bubble so faster-than-light velocities are possible." Now, the only question is: will the ship achieve faster-than-light travel ... or will the company hit those speeds once it has enough money from investors?
How about we figure out how to warp time first and then figure out a ship to utilize that science for the sake of travel?
The physics behind the warpship is purely theoretical, however. 'Dark energy' needs to be understood and harnessed, plus vast amounts of energy needs to be generated, meaning the warpship is a technology that could only be conceived in the far future. That said, Dr. Obousy's warpship design uses our current knowledge of spacetime and superstring theory to arrive at this futuristic concept.
Translation: We have a theory based on a lack of theory.
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So, they are seeking funding from the same people that invested in the Moller Skycar, then?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This article bothers me primarily because it simply recovers old ground on a theory of the possibility of warp travel. The idea of utilizing dark energy to create waves in space-time is hardly new or original and so what we end up seeing in front of us is a series of explanations about possible "space time bubbles" that we have no idea how to create, or even if they're technically feasible, supplemented by a few minor CAD renderings and a wonderful representation of a planar mesh. Pardon me if I'm not entirely enthused. There seems to be no real mention of any progress since this topic was last covered in the scientific press. In short, while a nice idea, it's an old theory and less than stellar (if you'll pardon the pun). This is more science fiction than science, in my opinion.
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
but this fully speculative article will only confuse people.
I can already hear my non-scientific-inclined friends assuring that it has been demonstrated by Dr. Blah that faster-than-light travel is absolutely possible and we even have the ship ready.
When Jules Verne wrote his masterpieces he made it clear that it was scientific fiction, and people thrilled shuffling the pages. He was later called a visionary, but he did not pretend to be a scientist, merely a very intelligent writer.
It bothers me when plausibly smart people make interesting points but place them in the wrong category - nothing wrong with being smart, creative, and wild but, please, let us distinguish science from speculation.
Aeroespacio.org
"but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy dot dot dot"
Well, if we could manipulate astronomical amounts of energy, instead of sailing off to Alpha Centauri or Wolf 359, we could:
But we can't. I know this is a fun dream. But before you try to replicate the Federation, take a look at the world that they were based upon. The Earth of Roddenberry is VERY different than this one. Let us strive to achieve THAT before we strive for the fastest way off of here.
Didn't Novikov solve that problem?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
William Shatner: "You know, before I answer any more questions there's something I wanted to say. Having received all your letters over the years, and I've spoken to many of you, and some of you have traveled... y'know... hundreds of miles to be here, I'd just like to say... GET A LIFE, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show! I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed! You've turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few years, into a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME!"
"The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. "
FTA
"I understand how the engines work now. It came to me in a dream. The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is, and the engines move the universe around it."
Cubert J. Farnsworth
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
What was it someone said about "a fool and his money"?
... are my best friends
I can't see this venture returning capital on anything that remotely resembles "short term". As such, I envision only government entities or wealthy individuals uninterested in ROI funding a project such as this.
Honestly, what kind of question could there be about investors in this type of technology? I didn't see anything remotely relevant to a business plan in any of the links.
I didn't either, but I do see a catastrophic sense of humor failure in your post.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I think you're just stringing us along.
I'll give a couple of examples, one using special relativity and one involving some general relativity, to amplify a little on what Geoffrey Landis said above.
Let's start with a couple of definitions. An "event" in relativity means a combination of time and place. Event B is defined as lying outside event A's light cone if the distance from A to B, in light-years, is greater than the time-difference between A and B, in years.
Example #1: Suppose that faster-than-light (FTL) were possible. Then it would be possible for event A to cause event B, where B lies outside A's light cone. You could simply travel in your FTL spaceship, starting at A and ending up at B, where you'd deliver a message. But according to special relativity, the time-ordering of events is not as absolute as in classical physics, because observers in different frames of reference disagree on the flow of time. Suppose the original setup was described according to one observer, O1, and now we have a second observer, O2, who is moving relative to O1 at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. If the speed of the relative motion is high enough, then you can always get a situation where O2 says B happened before A, rather than after A. (This only happens if B is outside A's light cone.) So O1 says A caused B, but O2 says B caused A.
Example #2: In general relativity, wormhole is a possible way to travel between different places, but since time and space are treated on the same footing in general relativity, there's every reason to believe that if wormholes exist, they would also go between different times, i.e., they would be time machines. But let's suppose for the sake of argument that you come across a wormhole that only goes between different places, with both mouths being synchronized in time. This would seem like FTL without time travel. But such a wormhole can always be used for time-travel as well. One method is to use gravitational fields to accelerate one mouth of the wormhole in some direction, bring it to a stop, and then use a similar acceleration and deceleration to bring it back to where it started. When you do this, you get something exactly like the twin "paradox" of special relavitity; the wormholes' times are no longer synchronized. So now if your no-time-travel FTL has been turned into FTL with time travel.
There's nothing special about these two examples. The idea that FTL naturally makes time travel possible is tightly bound to the structure of relativity. Since time travel seems to lead to causality paradoxes (e.g., going back in time and killing yourself), the conclusion seems to be that FTL leads to paradoxes, and that makes physicists suspect that FTL isn't actually physically possible.
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The Professor: Where's the device that lets to speed up or slow down the passage of time?
Fry: [pulls out a bong] Under the seat.